FROM THE ARCHIVES: Fright Night at Erb Hardware

This story originally appeared in the Tribune on Oct. 29, 2006. Susan Engle would write an annual "ghostbusting" story when she was the Tribune's Sunday editor, and her trip to the former Erb Hardware building was her closest brush with the paranormal. Engle died in 2013. The build has since been transformed into the Lewiston City Library.

It took just 30 minutes for the ghosts of Erb Hardware to make a believer out of me.

I'd been in the old building, located at Fifth and D streets in downtown Lewiston, for a couple of hours. My tour guide was Jeanine Bennett-Swan, co-owner of Cornerstone Interiors and Erb, which has its headquarters in its original downtown location. Her mother is the great-great-niece of the original owner, Robert S. Erb, so Jeanine knows where the bodies are buried. So to speak.

We had roamed throughout the massive interior, from the rock walls and solid timbers of the basement to the upper reaches of the top floor. Along the way, she told stories of the scary and creepy things she and current and former employees had experienced.

I decided to start my investigation in one of the most talked-about rooms in the building -- the night watchman's bedroom in the upper southwest corner of the building.

I wasn't worried -- unnerved might be a better description. I've done this kind of thing before, albeit with other reporters. Excursions to the Nezperce Hotel, the Lewiston Civic Theatre and the old Liberty Theater were great fun, but hadn't yielded much in the way of haunted happenings. This year, I decided a solo expedition was in order.

After Jeanine left, I sat in the night watchman's room for nearly 20 minutes. Although it faces onto D Street, the little room was surprisingly quiet. I kept waiting for something to happen, while hoping it wouldn't. My nerves surprised me. I don't rattle easily, even in a reputedly haunted building. Still, I made a few calls on my cell phone, trying to break the silence.

Boredom took over. I exited the room, turning out the light, but left the door open. The creepy ambiance of the maze-like rooms upstairs was undeniable as I made my way through several spaces jumbled with odds and ends, down a ramp and into the main storage room. I sat down on a sofa and began taking notes. The building was quiet, save for the creaks, whooshes and groans typical of old construction.

Then I heard a door close somewhere behind me. From where I'd just been. The sound was distinctive -- a soft chusss, a whispery click and then the solid chunk made when a door settles firmly against its housing.

I was alone, or so I thought. Goose bumps shivered up my spine and I glanced quickly behind me. Nothing. Then ... another sound. Footsteps. Work boots?

I rose and walked down the hallway and up the ramp leading to that little room. I firmly intended to go straight down the hallway and around the corner to check it out. I intended to, even as I turned left and quickly descended stairs leading to the mezzanine and then to the main showroom below.

My heart was hammering. I closed the door to the creepy upstairs and backed away. The deepening twilight cast the open display area in shadows. Shadows I didn't like.

I took the stairs to the main floor and headed for the lights in the showroom. I found a leather sectional, sat down and faced the mezzanine and the now-closed door to the upstairs.

"Stop it," I scolded. "Get a grip. You don't believe in ghosts. Remember?"

It didn't work, mainly because the other part of me kept remembering all those scary movies I've watched over the years. You know the ones, where the lone female ventures into blind corners and dark rooms by herself, only to be attacked by a terrifying stranger.

This lone female could not make herself go back upstairs to the night watchman's room ... and a sound that shouldn't have been there, but was.

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All old buildings come with stories. The older the building, the more stories there are. And in Lewiston, you don't get much older than Erb Hardware. It is the oldest business operating in the same location in the city. Although the company has a Lewiston Orchards store, the company's headquarters is still in its original home.

The oldest part of Erb Hardware, the basement and ground floor at the corner of Fifth and D streets, was built in 1896. E.P. Dorris of Farmington, Wash., brought his stock of hardware to the valley and opened Cash Hardware.

In 1897, Robert S. Erb arrived in town and got a job the following year at Cash Hardware. He stayed four years, and then left town, returning in 1910 to take over management of the store. In 1912, Erb Hardware was born.

The history of the Inland Northwest was written in the walls of Erb Hardware. As the region grew, so did the store's reach. Erb printed its own catalogs and employed salesmen who traveled throughout the tri-state area. In fact, the steel used to build the Potlatch mill was sold through Erb Hardware.

The company was being managed by the trust company of a bank when Richard E. and JoAnn Bennett (Jeanine's mother), Jeanine and her sister, Leann Bennett, bought the remaining shares in the company.

They remodeled the building and operated the hardware store there until 1996, when they opened Erb's Hardware along Thain Road in the Orchards. The downtown store became Cornerstone Interiors and remains Erb's headquarters.

When she took possession of the keys in 1986, Jeanine, for whom the story had long been a tantalizing bit of family lore, headed for the little room.

What she found delighted and amazed her.

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What happened to the night watchman depends on who is telling the story.

The man departed the store under admittedly unusual circumstance, Jeanine says.

The watchman lived on site and had a comfortable room furnished with a bed and television, a sitting area and a table. One night, she thinks in about 1968, the watchman heard a noise in the store. Maybe he'd heard many such unnerving noises and was spooked by yet another. In any case, he pulled a gun on what turned out to be the general manager, who fired him on the spot. When the watchman left, the manager locked the room. It remained locked until Jeanine opened the door in 1986.

"It had been locked since the 1960s, but it looked almost the same," she recalls. "There was a TV on one of the dressers and slippers on the floor. The bed was turned back."

She initially dismantled the room and took some of the furniture home, but later thought better of it and set it back up again.

Other stories about the night watchman are harder to pin down. Some people say he disappeared, never to be heard from again.

One thing's for sure -- he left his bedroom slippers behind.

*n n

A devout Christian, Jeanine isn't sure she believes in ghosts. But that doesn't mean she hasn't heard and felt things she can't explain.

"The employees have all said they heard stuff in the southwest corner," she says. "It sounds like somebody walking upstairs."

Jeanine has had her own share of scary experiences. Several years after purchasing the store, she was upstairs in a small room, where she had installed a tanning bed. It was late in the evening and she was alone in the store, so she disrobed and got into the tanning bed. Since she was alone, she hadn't locked the wooden door to the room. About 10 minutes later, she heard the metal doorknob rattle -- as if it was being turned.

"I jumped up and the door was locked. I couldn't get it open."

For awhile, she was completely panicked. "I waited 10 minutes and then calmed down." Suddenly, the knob rattled again. When she tried the door again, it opened easily.

She still can't explain that incident, but says, "I don't work late anymore."

I'm not the only person who has heard the sound of closing doors. Several years ago, a couple of employees were in the coffee room upstairs when they heard a door slam.

"My office door was closed and it had flung open," Jeanine explains. What made the incident so unusual is the door sticks in the jam and couldn't have just swung open. And no one else was around at the time.

None of the present employees like to go to the basement by themselves and some limit their exposure to the upper floor as well.

"We had a couple of girls who worked here who just refused to go upstairs," she said.

Indeed, even people who don't believe in ghosts and hauntings find that upper story a challenge.

Jo Bozarth, a Cornerstone Interiors design consultant, is a Christian who doesn't believe in the traditional notion of ghosts. Nevertheless, she says, "There are places upstairs where I pray a little harder."

But the upstairs isn't the only place that provokes shudders.

"Everybody who has ever worked here is creeped out by the basement," Jeanine says.

There are light switches and electrical wires running throughout the basement, a warren of storage rooms and dark hidy-holes. Every three feet or so are signs that read, "Please turn off lights."

Not that the signs help. No matter how often the lights are turned off, Jeanine says they always come back on.

"The lights just seem to go on and off down there."

She's had the electrical system checked out, but can find no physical reason for the lights to come back on.

And then there's the story of the lady upstairs.

About four or five years ago, Erb had its holiday party at the store. The party went on for some time throughout the building. One of the last to depart was a couple who had been roaming around upstairs. When they rejoined the group on the main floor, they suggested someone go get the older lady who had been upstairs.

A search of the upper floor turned up no one, but the couple insisted an older lady, wearing a long black dress with a bun in her hair, had been up there just a few minutes earlier.

Later, when Jeanine told her mother about the weird incident, JoAnn Bennett said it sounded like the store's former bookkeeper, Betty Barr, who died about 25 years ago. The description also matches that of Barr's mother, the late Maude Erb.

"She's still balancing the books," Jeanine quips of the former bookkeeper.

*n n

The combination of those stories, combined with the vast and dark reaches of the 60,000-square-foot store, made for a powerful mix. More than an hour after hearing the mysterious noises upstairs, I remained snuggled in the comforting embrace of the leather sectional in the showroom.

I had planned to stay in the store at least through midnight but as twilight gave way to full dark and the reach of the store's front lights diminished, my resolve wavered.

Instead of staying past midnight, as is my usual practice, I exited the front door at just past 7:30 p.m. I felt like a wimp.

I've tried to explain away the sounds I heard upstairs.

The mysterious footsteps, so reminiscent of a man in work boots? It could have been the creaks of a century-old building settling down for another night's sleep.

After all, I hadn't seen anything. I hadn't felt threatened, not even a little bit.

But I was scared. Sitting downstairs in the showroom, it was just a tiny bit of fear. Whenever I thought of going back upstairs to the southwest corner of the building, the terror ramped up. I don't like not being able to explain things and I couldn't explain the sound of that closing door.

It wasn't a car door. It wasn't a trick of my ears. No matter how hard I try, I just can't find a reason for that sound. I know what I heard. I know it shouldn't have been there, but it was.

For a die-hard skeptic, the snick-sssss-chunk of a door being pulled firmly shut opens a Pandora's box I'm at once reluctant and eager to explore.

I'm already envisioning a return trip to the Erb building, perhaps with reinforcements in tow.

No ghost is going to get the better of me.

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Engle is the Tribune's Sunday editor. She may be contacted at scengle@lmtribune.com or (208) 743-9600, ext. 228.